4io 



PERCHING BIRDS. 



fields, where it utters its short mechanical song from a clod of earth, a clump of 

 dockweed, or the coping of some stone wall or turf dyke. Although Mr. Dresser 

 asserts that the corn-bunting, as this species is often termed, is seen only in pairs 

 during the breeding-season, we have seen as many as a hundred of these birds 

 flying together at the end of May, and can vouch for their associating together in 

 numbers even in the nesting-time. Sometimes they roost upon the ground like 

 skylarks, but we have known them roost habitually in a fir-plantation. They feed 

 partially on insects, but in autumn and mid- winter they appear to subsist almost 

 entirely on grain. The nest of the common bunting is a loose structure, built 



ORTOLAN BUNTING AND BLACK-HEADED BUNTING (§ nat. size). 



upon the ground in a tuft of rough herbage, and constructed of dry grass bents 

 and pieces of moss, lined with finer stems of grass and sometimes a little hair. 

 The eggs vary greatly in coloration, being either white or buff in ground-colour, 

 blotched and streaked with purplish brown, grey, and pale brown. Not unfre- 

 quently the common bunting assumes a white or cream-coloured plumage ; one 

 shot a few years ago being as yellow as a canary. The usual colour is dull brown 

 above, streaked with darker brown ; the under-parts being buffy white, and the 

 breast and flanks streaked with black. 

 Black-Headed South-Eastern Europe is the home of the handsome black-headed 



Bunting. bunting (E. melanocephala), which but rarely strays into Western 

 Europe, though it has been obtained repeatedly upon the island of Heligoland, and 



